Love’s Labour’s Lost
The Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon

“A PERFORMANCE of Love’s Labour’s Lost is a sort of entertainment to be valued rather for Shakespeare’s sake than for its own.” So suggested George Bernard Shaw — no great fan of the Bard. Director Emily Burns seems to have taken this advice to heart.

One mustn’t be too critical. At the expense of being accused of cultural heresy, I am inclined to believe that it is expecting too much of modern audiences, attuned to digital messaging languages, to engage with what is one of Shakespear’s most complex linguistic plays.

It is, perhaps unfortunately, one of number of plays in the canon that, without the great iconic Lears, Hamlets and Twelfth Nights, would probably not  be part of the current theatre scene.

But of course this is the RSC with its brief to preserve our greatest writer’s works.

Emily Burns sets about the problem of engaging the audience by reshaping aspects of the play — sensibly cutting the text, ditching a main comic character and significantly, according to the programme, removing the court of Navarre to the freedom of a Caribbean island.

Here four young men who could be on a holiday jaunt surprisingly submit to their leader, Ferdinand (King! Of NavarreI in agreeing to a sojourn of three years’ study including the vow of giving up any contact with women. Of course, the girls — (the Princess of France!) and her three friends — turn up.

A battle of witty exchanges commence, full of punning, Elizabethan double entendre and topical references, particularly between Luke Thompson’s Berowne, the brightest guy, and Ioanna Kimbook’s Rosaline, the even brighter doll.

But Shakespeare himself must have realised that his audiences might tire of the badinage and turns to knockabout comedy, here given its head with Jack Pardoe’s zany Spanish Don Armado convulsively catapulting around the stage and finally directing and acting three of the parts in a performance for the toffs which is a dry run for Bottom’s Pyramus and Thisbe show in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The language difficulties are a problem not only for the audience but also for the hard-working cast. Here Tony Garners’ pedantic Holofernes excels.

The trouble is that if the main plot is treated as a romp, then the  comedians have to work so much harder.

This was a press night performance and the customary whooping audience’s standing ovation will certainly please the box office.

Plays until May 18. Box office: 01789 331-111, rsc.org.uk.